Accessing young people via schools?

We have been growing and nurturing young black leadership for over 20 years and I have noticed how challenging it has become accessing young people through local secondary schools. We have tried using traditional routes (newsletters, emails, flyer call outs using social media) resulting in very limited responses. I write as I wanted to find out if others supporting teenagers in the community are having similar challenges?

Whilst its understandable our schools are facing perhaps the most serious challenges raising attainment and achievement since the second world war, I believe these times call for our schools to be open to external support. And even more willing to attract and engage non traditional approaches to collaborate. Especially from partners like Voyage who focus on working with young people least engaged in schools and those lacking access to support services and could be on the peripheries of educational and social exclusion.

Over the pandemic we used our downtime to devise a unique Youth Leadership course in climate justice/ sustainability and rooted its delivery in the community with amazing top shelf partners (Greenpeace, Action for Conservation, May Garden Project, IEMA to name a few). We believe our focus on young people of colour will not only make engagement and learning highly immersive and impact driven it will also create unique pathways to employment in an industry that is still only 3.1% diverse. Read more about our new course requiring a three month commitment here.

With so much of our time, costs and passion going into our course and our struggles reaching out to schools we remain open to partners across the youth divide who may wish to refer young people (from year 8 and year 9 or aged 13 and 14 years) to us. Our leadership course starts in September 2022 and in the meantime we are road testing our course using bite size workshops to measure our potential impact, refine and strengthen the delivery of our partners and our new team of tutors. If you wish to learn more about our course and sign up to our workshops why not reach out by responding to this or emailing us directly here.

We take a long term view about our work and partnerships so feel free to connect anytime and lets discuss, explore and collaborate... We have also adopted a digital delivery system called Moodle, so even if you are outside London we would still love to hear from you.

I sincerely wish to thank the many corporate companies, charities, SMEs, the Shoal Collective, my board of trustees and countless individuals who have reached out to us and offered their time, support and donations to grow us in these very crucial times.